You Teach Me Pia Gow, I Will Help You Write

Yesterday did not start well. We had a busy morning, normal for the Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays of the nascent Fall 2009 semester, and I asked one of the early morning students when his paper was due.

It's a simple question. When is your paper due? The answer: a date + a time. First, he told me that it's just a first draft. I asked when he had to hand it in, and he said something else that did not include a date + a time. That's two. I asked again. He said something else and I suggested that he look at his syllabus. He took out his syllabus and said, "I think it's ___," and I then I prodded him to make sure by checking his syllabus very carefully. He did, and he gave me a date + a time.

If this job had a fine print, it would definitely include some mention of the repetition of such questions to reach specific answers. It's the closest this job gets to water torture. Those drops are harmless on there own, but they just keep dropping dropping dropping.

Thus, yesterday did not start off well. Thankfully, it improved. Through Pia Gow.

Each semester brings us new regulars. One of our new regulars has been working on a paragraph about her favorite form of relaxation, going to the casino to play Pia Gow, for the past week or so. She's got the general idea of the assignment, but she keeps using the word "fun" to explain why it's relaxing, so I've been trying to draw some specifics out of her*. That can be a slow process sometimes because people don't realize what kind of details others need in order to understand the everyday, obvious things of life they are covering in their writing.

Yesterday, she didn't just bring her draft. She brought cards. She was going to teach me Pia Gow.

She spread the cards out on the table in seven stacks of seven. She was the dealer, I was the player. She told me that the dealer is always seven and then had me pick a number. Two (my number in whatever sports teams I find myself on). She arranged the cards according to my choice and began to explain how we play.

She told me about high and low hands, what I'm looking for in arranging each, and then had me give it a go. She explained this clearly, without hitch or hesitation, and when she showed her cards and flipped mine, she would flip one card with another. When they wouldn't cooperate, I saw that it was because of the too-smooth table, and the look on her face, a quick flash of frustration, told me that she has done this before on the right kind of table.

I was right. She told me she's a dealer. She deals all kinds of card games at one casino, and then goes out to play her favorite, Pia Gow, at another with friends--friend I found out later are also dealers.

I didn't find out she was a dealer until I told that the game seemed complicated and wondered why she found it so relaxing. She said it was part of the casino world where she felt comfortable. I asked why and she then let it spill that she works there, that she knows the other dealers at other casinos. That's when I got it. She found this complex game so relaxing because she knows it, she explains it, and she teaches it five times a week. She was able to run through various hand scenarios for me faster than I could actually pick up that she was presenting a new option for how I could play. She knew the ins and outs because she's seen them play out in front of her.

She also found Pia Gow relaxing because it's a slow game. I didn't know she was a dealer, but she did let me know that detail early on. I just didn't understand it until we played. Remember those high and low hands? Each hand played in Pia Gow gives the dealer and the player two chances to win, which leads to a lot of pushes. She told me that this game is a push game. There's not a lot of big wins, but more importantly, your fifty dollar buy-in lasts a long time because your money doesn't bleed away every hand.

Pia Gow's nature as a push game allows for socializing, imbibing (for free in Vegas, she said, but not at her casino), and watching other players. Earlier, I told her that she needed to explain why the game is relaxing because not everyone finds gambling relaxing. As we played and pushed often, I told her I understood what she meant about the slow pace allowing players to enjoy hours at the table.

She helped me understand Pia Gow, and then I helped her understand how to go about writing about it. She found it so relaxing because it was familiar, it let her play for a long time, and she got to enjoy it as a player, not a dealer. She needed to tell readers how she grew familiar with the game as a dealer, and then explain why she so enjoyed sitting at the table as a player.

I told her to go pack her paragraph with details and come back so I could help her see how to decide what details to keep and what to cut**.

After she left, I couldn't help but think about how writing classes often separate writers from their subjects. We gather in rooms with tables and computers, we discuss, we put black marks on pages, and we rarely send people out to interact with what they are supposed to be putting down on paper.

Is this a breakdown in immediacy, in the connection between the word generating person and the subject those words are attempting to convey? Journalists go knock on doors, talk to people, look at places, and experience the environments they are writing about. Novelists go to the places they write about or spend time with people who inspire their characters (or look up journalists' accounts as research).

I remember reading that David Foster Wallace immersed himself in tax laws while preparing to write The Pale King, and that "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" was written after he actually went on the cruise it discusses.

I wonder how we could shorten the gap between classroom and subject, bring some immediacy to writing assignments, place those recording the sensory details in the same place as the stimuli, and make writing the result of an experience, not just the recalling of one.

I say all this because it was genuinely fun to learn this game from this student instead of just talk about this game with this student. She was an expert, and we were doing something real. We weren't stuck in the realm of the abstract, detached from what she was writing about. We were doing what she was writing about, and then we moved to writing about it while the cards were still on the table.

*All the time. I actually made a sign that says BE SPECIFIC and placed it between two of the computers. Yesterday, I was telling a student that she needed to bring specific promises and changes into a paper hinging on President Obama's failure to deliver on said promises, which were alluded to but never named. I didn't just tell her this once. It came up multiple times. Her friend, who was waiting not working, walked over to the sign, picked it up, and waved it in front of the writer's face.

**I often tell students what I was told by good teachers. Phil Heldrich, my poetry professor at Emporia State, told us that it's always easier to cut that it is to add. It's true.

Drawing the Lines

Two students just left. They each had an essay about something they liked. One: soccer. The other: singing. The assignment: argue that something they liked is worth liking.

The drafts were about as general as could be. He liked soccer because of health, and she liked singing because it relieved stress. That was about all that was there, so I started asking questions.

He doesn't just like soccer. He is on a soccer team in a league here in Tucson. He plays every week. She doesn't just sing. She goes over to a friend's house every weekend to sing karaoke.

They just needed to set up their boundaries. A soccer game needs the white lines at the edge of the field to determine when the ball is in play and when it's not. Once those boundaries are set, the teams can generally do whatever they what to score as long as they follow soccer's basic rules*.

An essay needs similar attention paid to where the limits are in order. I told these students that they are free to zoom in from soccer and singing to playing on a soccer team and singing karaoke at a friend's house. That tells them what kind of details are in play. He can discuss who is on the team, how often they play, how often they win, where they play, who they play, and why he enjoys being a part of all of this. She can examine why she loves going to this friend's house at the end of the week to sing someone else's songs into a microphone in front of her friends.

This is doable. They are both perfectly capable of writing about these experiences. They just need to know that they can.

*Don't touch the ball with your hands, stay onside, don't foul anybody. Other than that, it's wide open for creativity in tactics, team setup, and ball movement. I would argue that this is how essay should be taught, as well: give writers a goal, set up the basics, and let them set up their paper so as to accomplish that goal in their own fashion. You can always talk through their tactics, team setup, and ball movement after they have given it a go.

FAQ: Can you make sure this is good?

That is not a generalization. We are asked that exact question--Can you make sure this is good?--frequently. Those are the words.*

The simplest of answers: No.

The process is always longer than that. People come to us for help, they just don't know what help we have to give. Instead of a bunch of marks on a page that will turn into corrections that students may or may not understand, we have questions.

I usually ask student writers who ask this question if they think their paper is not good. They are not accustomed to this question. It shocks some people visibly. They get a strange, confused expression on their face. If they were moving, they stop. Not everybody reacts this way, but a good number of people may have never been asked to think about the quality of their own work before.

My question leads to why they think their paper is not good. This is the important point in the conversation. They usually have a good idea. Suddenly they are able to verbalize that they know their paper has no thesis, that they need to work on organization, that the are struggling with the conclusion, or some other specific issue that was lurking behind their general request for goodness.

Some of them fall back from making sure it's good to wanting to make sure "it makes sense" or "it flows." I keep on going. I ask them why they think it doesn't. Eventually, they are able to evaluate their own work, and most of the time, they are right.

These students have somehow grown accustomed to other people making sure it's good. When asked to be specific in what they think is malfunctioning in their paper, when they start to think about it, when they do that work, they are able to start to make sure it's good, and we are able to help them do so.

It all comes down to ownership. I find that most people are perfectly capable of crafting a thoughtful paper if they are willing to think about it, answer questions, and dig into what they are trying to say. That's why I make them dig into what they think is wrong in the first place.

FAQ: Print in the Library

It's the beginning of the fall semester, so we, along with every other office on campus, are peppered with questions. People want to know where classes are, how to get ahold of people, where to find services, and we usually know where to send them.

Those are the general, new-student, beginning-of-the-semester questions. We also get certain questions that pertain to our specific expertise not only around the time when classes start, but throughout the semester.

One of those is about printing. People see computers here in the Writing Lab, so they think printing happens here. It doesn't.

A few people asked today. We have one sign that says Print in the Library, but it's not enough. I printed a twin* sign for our door. I told Larry** about our new sign, and Brooks made a joke about having a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list for the Writing Lab.

I thought, "Hey, that's a good idea." I told Brooks I would put it on the blog. So here I am, starting a new feature on the blog. Whenever a frequently asked question comes up, I'll post how it's asked, who asks it, and how we usually answer it.

*A fraternal twin. I changed the wording just a bit to make sure people know not only to go to the library, but that the library is upstairs in the other building.

**The math guy, who also fields this question all the time.

Never an Off Day

It's Sunday. I'm not at work right now, but I was thinking this morning, for whatever reason, about writing and research, about simple assignments and the complicated papers that can grow from them, and I decided on something I would like to do in the context of a research+literature class (like Pima's Writing 102).

It's in two stages for two specific reasons.
Stage 1: Meet an Author
Stage 2: Tell Someone Else to Read an Author

Here's the first stage. I'd like to have students research contemporary and recent authors. That could be pretty broad in terms of places, but I'd try to keep the timeframe fairly recent. I think I would make a list of authors and tack on a little info about that person. I'd let them choose who they want to look into. They could even go off the list as long as they convince me their choice is worth it.

Here's the reason for the first stage. I work with a lot of student writers who don't have the knowledge of their subjects and arguments that they need to form a solid essay because they have not invested the time into the process of research. I'm not blaming anyone here. I'm not pointing my finger at lazy students or teachers who rush through a semester. I'm just saying: writing is a result of thinking, so let's give folks we expect to write a little time to think. Let's make sure they have it. Let's make sure their brains can soak up enough information to form an opinion.

The first stage allows the student to get to know the research process while getting to know their author. We could work on database searches, knowing what kinds of sources are legitimate*, how to quote and paraphrase, choosing what to quote and what to paraphrase, organizing information from sources in a paragraph in your own paper, and all kinds of other little things that pop up in research.

The second stage would move on to adding in an argument. Here's my plan**: As a class, we would present our findings on our authors. Then each student would choose an author to support as someone people--not just academics or students or bookworms or nerds or kids whose parents don't buy them XBoxes--should read. They would have to think critically and connect who that author is, what that author writes about, where they came from, where they went, when they lived, and other contextual whowhatwhenwherehows with the same kinds of contextual issues in the people they are saying should read their author.

I'd love to see the arguments people come up with. I guess this comes from my desire to simplify assignments in order to let the complications grow organically from the students' thought processes, my hope that people see value in reading, and my observation that Writing classes often ask people to learn a skill which they have never seen in use. This assignment (which would really stretch over an entire semester in three large parts; the third being a revision stage that rarely gets taught but nearly always needs learning) would allow students to form their own ideas about something they have worked at gaining familiarity with, argue for time spent with your nose in a book, and learn more about people who choose to spend their time writing.

*Too many times I see people rushing through a research paper of one kind or another and all they've done is go to a few different basic sites like encyclodepias, Wikipedia (No!), About.com, or some other surface level biographical site with information gleaned from some other surface level biographical site. That's shoddy researchmanship.

**This is all just thinking and hoping because I'm not teaching right now, and if I were, I would be teaching Writing 70, which exists to help people write a solid sentence and then a solid paragraph.

The Microbiologist in Room A107

This is a bulletin board I put up in one of the Writing classrooms here on campus (all the bulletin boards were all either blank or full of remnants of material from before I started at Desert Vista in 2006). It's a quote I found from a microbiologist from an article on how research should make you feel stupid.

That particular classroom is most often used for Writing 101 and Writing 102, which are research- and argument-focused classes. I thought it would be helpful for the students in that classroom to remember that scholarly, professional people don't know everything. They just press on and keep figuring things out.



Here is what happened after I put up this bulletin board. Not graffiti, but conversation.



Here's a closer look. What is this anonymous person thanking God for?



The idea of trying. The microbiologist's "it" in this case is a research problem he was having trouble with, so he asked a Noble Prize winner--who said he didn't know how to solve it.

So many people just need to know that they don't have to know, they just need to attempt, to guess, to explore, to walk out on a limb and see what happens.

That line under "things" is not a stray pen mark. It travels downward.



to the final piece of the quote.



It's my favorite part of the whole quote. I love the use of the word "muddle." I think it's important to hear "as best we can." That's all we can do. Muddle the best we can. What we do not know has no boundaries, so we can just keep pushing forward with what we can learn.



And this final anonymous note encapsulates the entire goal of the bulletin board. The microbiologist and all his scholarly research experience sounds like the community college student writing a paper and finding sources in the library database. The context is different, the scale and scope of the projects are different, but the idea stays the same: do what you can, keep moving forward, and keep learning--even if you feel stupid.

Type for Free, My Friends

Last week, a student who visits the Writing Lab often came in with an urgent problem: the trial edition of Word on her laptop expired, but she needed to type a paper.

I contacted a friend of mine who works with Ubuntu Linux (he has written technical books for them, as well as rescuing another friend's computer by installing Linux). I figured he would know if a free or inexpensive word processing program existed for this student. He did.

He pointed me to OpenOffice.org. I knew nothing of Open Office, but now I'm sad that many students do not know. It's a free batch of programs from Sun Microsystems that match up with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and more. I'm all for anything that will help students spend less, and this student got the equivalent of Word for free.

Now she can work on her papers at home when she has the time instead of trying to work all her writing time into her busy schedule and the Writing Center's summer hours.